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“The Majority Report:
Supporting the Educational Success of Latino Students in California” provides
an extensive look at how the state’s largest ethnic group is faring at every
level of California’s education system. The report finds that while the over 3 million
Latino students in K-12 schools are the majority of California’s 6.2 million
K-12 population, and nearly 1 million Latino students are in California’s
public colleges and universities, these students continue to face troubling
inequities from early learning through higher education. California’s Latino
students:

·Attend the nation’s most segregated schools;

·Are often tracked away from college-preparatory coursework;

·Are sometimes perceived as less academically capable than their
White or Asian peers; and

·Have insufficient access to early childhood education;

·Are less likely to feel connected to their school environment;

·Are more likely to be required to take remedial courses at
colleges and universities.

The study also highlights
bright spots throughout the state where promising practices are helping Latino
students advance academically, dispelling the myth that these gaps cannot be
closed, and reiterating the need for more action and urgency from state
leaders.

The Majority Report includes a policy timeline and infographic and is accompanied by
a data tool looking at achievement gaps by county.

In the current conflict in SCUSD, the District’s discussion
of the budget and the Bee’s coverage are incomplete and lacking.

Yes, the District has at least $80 million in reserves. The taxpayers passed Prop. 30 and 55 to
adequately fund the schools. Since 2013
the district has received an increase of revenues of more
than $67 million.

First, the professionals in the district deserve respect and
a significant raise in pay. Second, what is missing? Over $10 million per year of this increase is
funded by the state taxpayers under the Local Control Funding Formula. LCFF.

By law, these funds must be spent to improve the education
of children by lowering class size, and focusing on low income, English
Language Learners, foster children, and Special Education. The district has
refused repeated requests to spend the funds as required. Requests and alternative budgets have been submitted each year by the Community Priorities Coalition. The Institute is a member of the coalition.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost.

Dr. Duane E. Campbell

Tell No Lies.

Defense of democracy is essential ! July 2017,

On every one of his first 40 days in office, Trump made false statements in public. They ranged from assertions that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, causing him to lose the popular vote, to claiming that the United States has a $17 billion trade deficit with Canada. (We had an $8.1 billion dollar trade surplus with Canada in 2016.)

The New York Times has compiled a list of his lies and provided fact checking sources.

This is a great service to the public.I encourage you to read the list.

I, along with the Moyers Report think the Times should receive a Pulitzer Prize for this public service.

At 2:45 PM on July 14, 2016, the California State Board of Education unanimously endorsed a new
History /Social Science Framework for California’s public schools that includes
a substantial addition of Chicano/Latino history, improved history of LGBT
people, and improvements in several other histories.

This completes a 6 year effort against substantial
opposition to revise this
Framework. As a result textbooks in
California in 2017 will be the most inclusive ever required, and all students
will be taught an inclusive history.

The Challenge of Writing Chicano/Latino History Into
California Textbooks

June, 2016.

History and social science textbooks in public schools in
California and most of the nation are racist, class biased, and ignore LGBT
history. This condition will change in California in 2017 when new textbooks
are adopted.

Under a decision made on May 19, 2016, the students of California will finally be
encouraged to know the history of Latino civil rights leaders, like Cesar
Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Filipino labor leaders like Larry Itliong, as well as an accurate and inclusive history
of LGBT activists as a part of the
history of California and the nation. These
topics are currently substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum
in California. A final decision by the California Board of Education is scheduled for July 13 and 14.

The Quality Instructional Materials Committee of the California State Board of Education decided to
include these long ignored histories in their re-writing of the History/Social
Science Framework for the state. The
Framework document sets the parameters
and the minimums required of textbooks used in the schools. Because
of California’s large size and market, what goes into California textbooks frequently also gets written into textbooks
around the nation.

In
the current books, when the 51 % of
students who are Latino , and the 11.5 % who are Asian, or the estimated 11 %
of students who are LGBT do not see
themselves as part of history, for many their sense of self is
marginalized. Marginalization negatively impacts their
connections with school and their success at school. School marginalization also
contributes directly to low level civic engagement. It contributes
to an nearly 50% drop out rate for Latinos and some Asian groups and LGBT students. An accurate
history would provide some of these students with a a sense of self, of
direction, of purpose. History and social
science classes should help young people acquire and learn to
use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent
and responsible citizens throughout their lives.

As
a consequence of the current outdated history texts for California public
schools, most schools, most teachers, fail to teach an accurate,
complete, complex history of the
Chicano- Latino people, of Asian Americans and of LGBT youth, among others.
This essentially means that the writers are choosing not to
recognize reality. – not to tell the full story.

And, while it is accurate
that California and the nation has a
general problem of civic engagement of the young, it is also true that the state has a
very specific problem with the rate of Latino and Asian voter participation
and civic engagement.

Rates of voting and voter registration provide
a window into civic engagement. The
proportion of state voter registration
that is Latino and Asian has remained far below the proportions of these groups
in the state’s overall population. In 2010, Latinos in the state made up 37.6%
of the general population while they were only 21.2 % of the registered voters. The Asian
population was 13.1 % of the state population but only 8.1 % of the registered voters.

We know that we can do better. California has the largest school population
of any state, with more than 6,226,000 students in school in 2015. California
students make up more than 11 percent of the United States total. California,
along with some 16 other states, adopts textbooks for use by the entire state
instead of purchasing books district by
district . This makes the California textbook adoption the largest single textbook
sale in the nation. Gaining this market is an important goal for
textbook publishers. Many publishers write and edit their books in a targeted
attempt to win a piece of the large and lucrative California and
Texas markets. Publishers promote and try to sell books
developed in California and Texas throughout the nation in an effort to
increase their profits. In recent
years as Republicans gained control of state governments, Texas, Arizona
and several other southern states have moved their textbook
histories sharply to the right.

The 1980’s were the age of Ronald
Reagan. As Governor of California he appointed members of the State
Board of Education. His influence continued long after he became
President of the U.S. The view of history that won the textbook battles in
California in 1987 was crafted by
(then) neoconservative historian Diane Ravitch and former California State Superintendent of
Public Instruction Bill Honig.

The 1987 Framework,
for History and the Social Sciences is still in use today with minimal modifications.
It
expanded African American, Native American, and White women’s history coverage but
remained totally inadequate in the
coverage of Latinos and Asians. The only significant change between the 1987 and the currently adopted Framework was the addition of a new
cover, a cover letter, and additions of photos such as of Cesar Chavez . Advocates term this photo shop curriculum
reform.

The then dominant
neo conservative view of history argued that textbooks and a common history should
provide the glue that unites our society. Historical themes and interpretations
were selected in books to create unity
in a diverse and divided society, a unity from the point of view of the dominant
class. This viewpoint assigned to
schools the task of creating a common culture and of accepting the current
unequal political/ economic system as democratic. ( In reality, television,
mass media, and military service may do
more to create a common culture than do schools and books.)

Conservatives assign the task of cultural assimilation to
schools, with particular emphasis on the history, social science, and
literature curricula. As scholars such as Michael Apple and J.W. Loewen have
well argued, historians promoting consensus
write textbooks that downplay the roles of slavery, class, racism, sexism ,
genocide, and imperialism in our history. They focus on ethnicity and
assimilation rather than race, on the success of achieving political reform for
the White majority, representative government, and economic opportunity for
European American workers and immigrants. They decline to notice the high
poverty rate of U.S. school children, the crisis of urban schooling, and the
continuation of racial divisions in housing and the labor force. In California
they declined to notice that Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Latinos as well as
Asians contributed to the development of this society and that they have become
a near majority of the residents.

This consensus conservative viewpoint history dominates textbook
publishing in California until 2017. These partial and incomplete histories do not
empower students from our diverse cultural communities. By recounting primarily
a consensual, European American view, history and literature extend and
reconstruct current White supremacy, sexism, and class biases in our society.
When texts or teachers tell only part of the story, schools foster intellectual
colonialism and ideological domination.

As I argued in a prior book, marginalization of
students from their own history negatively impacts their connections with
school and their success at school. It disempowers. While an
accurate history can provide a sense of
self, of direction, of purpose and make schooling more relevant, realistic, and
worth pursuing- lack of history of self, does not commit students to democratic
participation in the society.

Based upon the changes we made in the new 2016 document students will now not only read the conservative view, they will
also read material to explain mandates such as the following that are included
in the new Framework.

“Students may study how Cesar Chavez, Dolores
Huerta, and the United Farm Workers’ movement used nonviolent tactics, educated
the general public about the working conditions in agriculture, and worked to
improve the lives of farmworkers. Students should understand the central role
of immigrants, including Latino Americans and Filipino Americans, in the farm
labor movement. This context also fueled the brown, red, and yellow power
movements. The manifestos, declarations, and proclamations of the movements
challenged the political, economic, and social discriminations faced by their
groups. They also sought to combat the consequences of their “second-class
citizenship” by engaging in grassroots mobilization.

For example, from 1969 through 1971 American
Indian activists occupied Alcatraz Island; while in 1972 and 1973, American
Indian Movement (AIM) activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building
in Washington, D.C. and held a stand-off at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Meanwhile,
Chicano/a activists staged protests around the country, like the famed Chicano
Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970 that protested the war in Vietnam, and formed
a number of organizations to address economic and social inequalities as well
as police brutality, and energized cultural pride. Students should learn about
the emergence and trajectory of the Chicano civil rights movement by focusing
on key groups, events, documents such as the 1968 walkout or “blowout” by
approximately 15,000 high school students in East Los Angeles to advocate for
improved educational opportunities and protest against racial discrimination,
the El Plan de Aztlan, which called for the decolonization of the Mexican
American people; El Plan de Santa Barbara, which called for the establishment
of Chicano studies; the formation of the Chicano La Raza Unida Party, which
sought to challenge mainstream political parties, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzelez’s
“I am Joaquin,” which underscores the struggles for economic and social
justice. California activists like Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones were part of a
broader movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, which
brought a new attention to the cause of equal rights for homosexual Americans.
“

Page 562, lines 1204- 1214, Feb. draft, as
adopted.

Organizing Matters

I have spent more than six years working on this project- and it was
well worth it. The important changes we achieved were produced by years of collective
advocacy, lobbying, letter writing and organizing. After being blocked in our efforts in
2008, we created the Mexican American
Digital History site, ( www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org)then organized a
state wide network of scholars and community activists to pressure the State
Board of Education. At each stage we
had to explain why changing the textbooks was important ns why this tedious
process was important. We received
assistance from civil rights groups and
Latinos in the Democratic Party. Similar
and parallel campaigns were organized within the Filipino, Hmong, South Asian, and LGBT communities.

A conflict remains
unresolved in the new framework’s
description of the 6th and 7th
grade world history and geography courses on the appropriate terminology and description
of the history and cultures of the region that includes the
modern day nations of India, Pakistan, Sri Lank, Afghanistan, and more.

Interestingly we received no help from directly impacted
professional organizations such as the
California Council for Social Studies (teachers) nor from academics in university history departments.
History and social science departments in in colleges and universities that
prepare teachers will now have to
find faculty prepared to assist future teachers to understand and to present this “new” material.

The next steps will be to monitor the adoption of new
textbooks to be certain they respond to the new Framework as amended.

I would be happy to work with scholar and activists in other states and districts seeking to revise their textbooks to be more accurate and inclusive.

Duane Campbell is a professor emeritus of bilingual
multicultural education at California State University Sacramento, author of
several books including Choosing Democracy: a Practical Guide to Multicultural
Education, a union activist, and past chair of Sacramento DSA

Important opportunity to pursue equity in teacher preparation and hiring.

Kevin McCarty, May 16, 2016

California State Assembly.

I watched today the hearings on the Education Finance subcommittee of the Budget Committee and the testimony on the May Revise in particular relationship to the recognized approaching shortage of teachers.

It is good that the Governor’s proposal and the Dept. of Education response recognize this rapidly approaching problem, however their responses are inadequate.

Outreach strategies and recruitment web sites are fine, but the proposals fail because they fail to recognize that future teachers from the currently under represented Latino and Asian communities will not be there. During the Great Recession the teacher preparation programs focusing on resolving the problem of under representation were cut back and eliminated.

I will use Sacramento as an example, although the problem is state-wide.

In Sacramento the Funds from the Local Control and Accountability Plan were to be targeted to low income schools. This increased funding has led to a dramatic need for new teachers. Sacramento City Unified plans to hire 100 new teachers, and many other local urban districts will do the same. This faculty growth will continue for from 3-5 years.

Significantly credentialed teachers from the Latino community and several Asian communities will not be available to hire because the Sac State pipeline for minority teachers has been broken. A new generation of mostly Anglo teachers will be hired which will continue the past failure to integrate the teaching profession in this region. Ending the pipeline will shape the nature of the local teaching profession for decades. Latino students make up 37 % of Sac City Unified students, Asians 17.4 %, African Americans 17.7 %, and White students 18.8 %. Latino families now make up over 37 % of California residents and Latino descent children now make up over 50% of public school students.

What should you do?

It is too late to create new programs for teacher preparation for Fall of 2016, or to recreate programs that have been terminated.

Therefore I recommend that funds designated for improved teacher recruitment include a measure so that programs that have a history of providing a diverse teaching force receive a dedicated portion of the funds.

The programs designated in the Governor’s revise and the Dept. of Education proposals should be required to adopt strategies that will provide a diverse and representative teaching force. If not, this teaching shortage “emergency” will be used by the specified institutions to re create the existing inequalities of opportunities. The question facing the committee is are you going to recreate the past failure or begin to have teacher recruitment and preparation lead to a diverse teaching force? This proposed change is not on the stated agenda of the Governor’s revise, of the response of the Department of Education, nor is in included in the several bills currently proposed in the legislature.

I encourage you to act to bend the arc of change toward justice. I am available to clarify this problem.

Thank you for your consideration.

Dr. Duane E. Campbell

Education and Democracy Institute.

Improving Civic engagement of Latino Students

Mexican American/Chicano history is substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum in California- and it has been since 1986. This year we have an opportunity to change that.

California has the largest student population of any state, with more than 6,236,000 students in school in 2013. Students who are Mexican American of Latino heritage make up over 53% of the total school population.

Latino student political non participation and disconnectedness is significantly caused by Latino absence from the K-12 textbooks and curriculum.

Children and young adults need to see themselves in the curriculum. Students, have low levels of attachment to California and U.S. civics engagement in significant part because the government institution they encounter the most- the schools- ignore the students’ own history, cultures and experiences.

California state textbooks currently largely ignore the roles of Mexican Americans and Latinos in building this state. Students need to learn civic engagement – it is not automatic. Students need to learn that they belong , that they are a part of the community and its history.

California schools and history teachers should lead the way in preparingyoung people for civic life in ourpluralist society. Theyare not. Incomplete and inaccurate history, along with incomplete and inaccurate economics harms not only Latinos and Asians, but the Anglo students as well. When Anglo students are taught an inaccurate view of Latino /Mexicano history in the state, they fail to accurately understand the major demographic shift presently occurringand this lack of knowledgecontributesto fear, misunderstandingand conflict such as that promoted in the current anti immigrant campaigns.

If we don’t transform teacher unions now, our schools, our
profession, and our democracy—what’s left of it—will likely be destroyed. I
know. I am from Wisconsin, the home of Scott Walker and Paul Ryan. ( Bob
Peterson).

In 2011, in the wake of the largest workers uprising
in recent U.S. history, I was elected president of the Milwaukee Teachers’
Education Association (MTEA). Unfortunately, that spring uprising, although
massive and inspirational, was not strong enough to stop Gov. Walker from
enacting the most draconian anti-public sector labor law in the nation.

That law, known as Act 10, received support from the
Koch brothers and a cabal of national right-wing funders and organizations. It
was imposed on all public sector workers except the police and firefighter
unions that endorsed Walker and whose members are predominantly white and male.

Act 10 took away virtually all collective bargaining
rights, including the right to arbitration. It left intact only the right to bargain
base-wage increases up to the cost of living. The new law prohibited “agency
shops,” in which all employees of a bargaining unit pay union dues. It also
prohibited payroll deduction of dues. It imposed an unprecedented annual
recertification requirement on public sector unions, requiring a 51 percent
(not 50 percent plus one) vote of all eligible employees, counting anyone who
does not vote as a “no.” Using those criteria, Walker would never have been
elected.

Immediately following Act 10, Walker and the
Republican-dominated state legislature made the largest cuts to public
education of any state in the nation and gerrymandered state legislative
districts to privilege conservative, white-populated areas of the state…

Under these conditions, public sector union
membership has plummeted, staff has been reduced, and resources to lobby,
organize, and influence elections have shrunk…

Fortunately, teacher union activists across the
country are revitalizing their unions and standing up to these relentless
attacks. And this growing transformation of the teachers’ union movement may
well be the most important force in our nation to defend and improve public
schools and, in so doing, defend and improve our communities and what’s left of
our democratic institutions.

The revitalization builds on the strengths of
traditional “bread and butter” unionism. But it recognizes that our future
depends on redefining unionism from a narrow trade union model, focused almost
exclusively on protecting union members, to a broader vision that sees the
future of unionized workers tied directly to the interests of the entire
working class and the communities, particularly communities of color, in which
we live and work.

This is a sea change for teacher unions (and other
unions, too). But it’s not an easy one to make. It requires confronting racist
attitudes and past practices that have marginalized people of color both inside
and outside unions. It also means overcoming old habits and stagnant
organizational structures that weigh down efforts to expand internal democracy
and member engagement.

From Bread and Butter to Social Justice

Meanwhile, by the late 1980s and into the ’90s,
teacher activists in Milwaukee were connecting with other rank-and-file teacher
union activists through Rethinking Schools and the newly formed National
Coalition of Education Activists (NCEA). In 1994, 29 teachers’ union activists
from both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) met at the
Portland, Oregon, NCEA conference and issued a statement: “Social Justice
Unionism: A Working Draft” (see sidebar, p. 18).

Social justice unionism is an organizing model that
calls for a radical boost in internal union democracy and increased member
participation. This contrasts to a business model that is so dependent on staff
providing services that it disempowers members and concentrates power in the
hands of a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff. An organizing
model, while still providing services to members, focuses on building union power
at the school level in alliance with parents, community groups, and other
social movements.

Three components of social justice unionism are like
the legs of a stool. Unions need all three to be balanced and strong:

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Unified Board voted to require Ethnic Studies courses in all of their high schools.

On Tuesday, the LAUSD board
voted to require courses to offer ethnic studies classes at all of the district
high schools. A few courses had already
been offered, but this provides a substantial increase in offering.

San Francisco Unified will
consider a similar decision at their December meeting.

Children and young adults need to see
themselves in the curriculum. Students, particularly students of color,
have low levels of attachment to California and U.S. civil society messages in significant part because the
government institution they encounter the most- the schools- ignore the
students own history, cultures and experiences.

A fundamental way to engage students in
civic culture is to engage them in their own schools and communities.
That is where the students most encounter civic opportunities.

When the 51 % of the California students
who are Latino , and the 9 % who are Asian do not see themselves as part
of history, for many their sense of self is marginalized. Marginalization
negatively impacts their connections with school and their success at
school. It contributes to an up to 50% drop out rate for
Latinos and some Asian students. A more accurate, more complete
history provided in Ethnic studies courses would provide some
students with a a sense of self, of direction, of
purpose, even a sense that they should stay in school and learn
more. And, ethnic studies would provide Anglo students with an informed, accurate history
of the political and cultural development of our society. Ethnic studies
classes should help young people acquire and learn to use the civics
skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and
responsible citizens throughout their lives.

Add their history to the textbooks.
Add their literature to the literature books. Include all students in
Ethnic Studies classes. These students
are are California’s children. You can start by revising the California
History/ Social Science Framework to include their history.

In 2014 some California policy “leaders”
called for a renewal of civic learning in order to promote civic
education. Unfortunately, but
predictably, they have not proposed increasing ethnic studies. Instead, they have written a report, Revitalizing
K-12 Civic Learning in California, and they call it a Blue Print for
Action. http://www.powerofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/CLTF-Final-Report.pdf

The report even recognizes the diversity of California students.
They say,

“Civic learning is also vital for our increasingly
diverse California society. In 2012-2013, our 6.2 million K-12 students were 53
percent Latino, 26 percent white, 9 percent Asian and 6 percent African American, with the remaining 6
percent comprised of other
ethnicities. In addition, an increasing number of our students are not native speakers of
English. Almost 4 in 10 kindergarteners are English language learners. This
diversity, and the attention it requires, is now acknowledged in our school funding
model. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) recognizes

the necessity of investing in the reduction
and ultimate removal of inequitable outcomes in California public schools. Revitalizing civic learning
opportunities, in an
equitable manner, can contribute to meeting these goals.”

While it is beneficial to
recognize the need to “revitalize civic learning opportunities, in an equitable
manner,” it is not equitable to continue to impose an inaccurate and deceptive
view of history on the students.

While it is accurate that we
have a general problem of civic engagement of the young, it is also true
that we have a very specific problem with the rate of Latino and Asian voter
participation and civic engagement.

The report, as is common, is well
illustrated with compelling photos of very pleasant multi racial and
multiethnic student faces. They even note that the current
History Social Science Framework and Standards are over 15 years out of date- a
reminder that the State Board of Education and the California Legislature
should heed.

Regretfully the curricular directions they
propose take little or no account of the diversity of the students in our
schools.

What happens when students
and teachers are not considered- just policy insiders?

Two recently passed legislative bills
in California provide avenues through which communities and advocates can
work with schools to increase youth voter participation:

Assembly Bill 700 (2013) requires the
Instructional Quality Curriculum in all California high schools. This bill was
developed to increase civic participation and education

Assembly Bill 1817 (2014) encourages voter
participation among high school students, allowing students to register or pre-
register qualified classmates on high school campuses to vote in upcoming
elections. This bill amends current Education Code §49040 which established
“High School Voter Education Weeks” during the last two weeks in April and September
of a school year.

The report and these new laws miss the
single most direct and clear issue. The 1987 California History Social
Science Framework still in use today to guide the selection of
California textbooks expanded African American, Native American,
and women’s history coverage but remains totally inadequate in the coverage of
Latinos and Asians. The only significant change between the 1985 and the 2005
adopted Framework was the addition of a new cover, a cover letter, and a photo
of Cesar Chavez.

A more accurate, more complete
history provided in Ethnic studies courses would provide some
students with a a sense of self, of direction, of purpose,
even a sense that they should stay in school and learn more. And,
ethnic studies would provide Anglo students with an informed, accurate history of
the political and cultural development of our society. Ethnic studies classes should
help young people acquire and learn to use the civics skills, knowledge,
and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens
throughout their lives.

Add their history to the textbooks.
Add their literature to the literature books. Include all students in
Ethnic Studies classes. These students
are California’s children. We can
start by revising the California History/ Social Science Framework to include
their history and joining LA Unified in requiring Ethnic Studies Classes in
high school. This would be much more effective than the required voter
registration efforts of the report on Civic Competence.

Tom Torlakson won
re-election as California Superintendent of Public Instruction on Nov. 4, 2014.

This post explains why we
worked for the Torlakson re-election.

If you believe that to
live and work in a democracy is an important role for state government- then
this election was important. The
election will set the direction of school improvement for the next four years.

You and I have a
choice. It is not a perfect choice, but the options are stark. We can
continue with the current improvements in k-12 education (Torlakson), or we can
move the state down the road of test driven, corporate neoliberal model of
schooling (Tuck). Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kansas,
Louisiana, Texas, are following this route- and their schools are failing.

Current scores on
achievement tests for California students are too low. This is primarily
a result of California’s underinvestment in children, its lack of support for
children in poverty, and California’s low investment in k-12 schools for
the last thirty years.

We can not improve the
schools without improving funding for schools and support for children living
in poverty. That argument being made by Marshall Tuck is a fraud.

California education policy makers have once again written
and published a nice looking report on school curriculum – this one on the need
for improved civic education. As is the
norm for these tasks, a group of “well respected” civic leaders have participated.

If they
had engaged teachers working with diverse
voices in the committee, they would have heard more useful ideas.

Or, as
Barack Obama is said to have directed members of his cabinet, “Don’t do stupid
stuff.”

Corporate “
Reformers” Andrew Ross Sorkin. NYTimes.

Beginning with
the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, billionaires have long seen the nation’s
education as a willing cause for their philanthropy — and, with it, their own
ideas about how students should learn. The latest crop of billionaires,
however, has tended to take the line that fixing our broken educational system
is the key to unlocking our stagnant economy. Whether it’s hedge-fund managers
like Paul Tudor Jones (who has given tens of millions to support charter
schools) or industrialists like Eli Broad (who has backed “blended learning”
programs that feature enhanced technology), these philanthropists have
generally espoused the idea that education should operate more like a business.
(The Walton Foundation, backed by the family that founded Walmart, has taken
this idea to new heights: It has spent more than $1 billion supporting various
charter schools and voucher programs that seek to establish alternatives to the
current public-school system.) Often these patrons want to restructure the
system to make it more efficient, utilizing the latest technology and
management philosophies to turn out a new generation of employable students.

For many teachers,
Weingarten explained, this outside influence has become off-putting, if not
downright scary. “We have a really polarized environment in terms of education,
which we didn’t have 10 years ago,” she said. “Public education was a
bipartisan or multipartisan enterprise — it didn’t matter if you were a
Republican or Democrat or elite or not elite. People viewed public education as
an anchor of democracy and a propeller of the economy in the country.” Now, she
said, “there are people that have been far away from classrooms who have an
outsize influence on what happens inside classrooms. Beforehand, the
philanthropies were viewed as one of many voices in education. Now they are
viewed — and the market reformers and the tech folks — as the dominant forces,
and as dissonant to those who work in schools every day. She took a deep breath
and softened her tone: “In some ways, I give Bill Gates huge credit. Bill Gates
took a risk to get engaged. The fact that he was willing to step up and say,
‘Public education is important,’ is very different than foundations like the
Walton Foundation, who basically try to undermine public education at every
opportunity.”

From: Bill Gates has this idea for a History
Class. NYT. Sept. 8, 2014.

UCLA Report Finds
California The Most Segregated State for Latino Students State Has Little to
Celebrate 60 Years After Brown v Board of Education

We, the undersigned organizations, write to respectfully
request your support for the consideration of these community needs into the
district’s draft LCAP. These issue areas represent the concerns of our
community members as found in our conversation with them through community town
halls and our own surveys.

The Sacramento City Community Priorities Coalition is pleased to submit to the Sacramento City Unified School District for its 2014-15 Budget. We, the Coalition members: Black Parallel School Board, Building Healthy Communities, Hmong Innovative Politics, Hmong, Mein Lao Community Action Network, La Familia Counseling Center, Making Cents Work, People Reaching Out, Sacramento Area Congregations Together, Sacramento Council of PTA, and the Democracy and Education Institute have worked to obtain input from our communities and there results are the three main priorities for both the LCAP and the LCFF. They are:

Class size adjustments/reductions in select high need schools- beginning with k-3 and gradually progressing to higher grades after three years of LCAP implementation.

Culturally competent professional development to enhance school clime and ensure the use of effective and restorative discipline policies for all students.

After school and/or other early interventions support programs designed to improve classroom performance.

Our Budget reflects our community's priorities and we request that you consider our budget along with the District's staff budget in making the important decisions on providing the highest quality of education for all children.

While we commend the work that the SCUSD has done to gather
parent input in their draft LCAP, we urge SCUSD to go even further in engaging
parents, especially those who are limited English speakers and those who have
been impacted by the school closures. SCUSD's Public Education Volunteer
program collected 1,291 survey responses from an abundance of sources across
the district. While this number is noteworthy, it is important to point out
that our SCUSD has more than 43,000 students overall and many of their parents
remain disenfranchise.

Further changes to state standards, Academic Performance
Index (API) and school evaluations make it even more urgent and incredibly
important that the LCAP is done correctly this first year.

Sacramento City Community Priorities Coalition. June 5, 2014.

Ethnic Studies in California Schools

Assemblyman Luis Alejo, California Assembly

Re: Support AB 1750 (Alejo)

Dear Assemblyman Alejo: April
28, 2014

As Director of the Democracy and Education Institute, I
write in support of AB 1750 –Ethnic Studies, and to offer our assistance in this
work.

Given California’s increasing diversity, it is vitally
important that students receive knowledge of the various ethnic groups in our
state and that they learn to work together toward building our democracy.

California has one of the largest and most diverse student
populations in the country. In fact, traditional ethnic minorities account for
over 71 percent of the student population—with Latinos alone accounting for
over 52 percent. Given California’s annual
increase in diversity, it is especially important that students build knowledge
of the various racial and ethnic groups of our state. Incorporating ethnic
studies courses into standard high school curriculum is a means to accomplish
this.

The Democracy and Education Institute has been working on
this issue since 2009, and I have been working on the issue since 1986.

As a part of the effort to include Ethnic Studies I
encourage you to concentrate on expanding Ethnic Studies in the History/Social Science
Framework for California public schools.
This state document determines what is taught in our schools and what is
included in the textbooks. There is
almost no Mexican American history in the document. There is a 9th grade elective
course that could be offered. Your bill
should assist in that the CDE should report on the number and the nature of
Ethnic Studies offerings.

The current
Framework was written in 1986 and published in 1987 after a great deal of
controversy. The Framework is supposed to be revised each 7 years. The
Framework, along with the standards, provides the guidelines for what is to be
taught and what is to be included in the history and social science textbooks
in California. In 2009, the History /Social Science Framework was up for
re consideration but the process was halted by the budget crisis.

The 1987
History Framework still in use in our schools today expanded African
American, Native American, and women’s history coverage but remains totally
inadequate in the coverage of Latinos and Asians. The only significant change
between the 1985 and the 2005 adopted Framework was the addition of a new
cover, a cover letter, and additions of photos such as of Cesar Chavez . As you know descendants of Latinos currently
make up 50.1 percent of students in California schools.

During the
winter and spring of 2009, a committee of educators appointed by the State
Board of Education met in staffed working sessions to review the current
History-Social Science Curriculum Framework and Evaluation Criteria and to
recommend revisions to the document. The committee met in a series of two-day
public sessions which were well attended by professionals and civic advocates
concerned about the content of history
and social studies education in California.
I and others gave testimony. My
own effort, and that of my colleagues, was to focus on the failure of the
current framework to adequately describe the history and contributions of the
Mexican American people to California history.

The state fiscal crisis of 2009 stopped all work on this
revision. Your bill AB 1750 should
assist in re-opening the discussion.

I can tell you that the Curriculum Framework
Committee listens when legislators make suggestion.

Based upon my
own experience of following this issue for decades, I am concerned that you
bill as amended only asks the State Department of Education to commission a
report on model programs and standards.
For your information, the SDE frequently creates committees that lack
substantive diversity and particularly expertise in ethnic studies.

The 2009 review committee, which performed in a
professional manner, had a total of two Hispanics on a committee of 22. It was clear that they did not invite well
informed members. However, they did
listen and make positive recommendations.

It is particularly important to act on ethnic studies before new
national common core standards are adopted, predicted for 2016. Common
core standards have been established in Math and Literacy and are
producing major changes in curriculum textbooks and teaching in
California. There are no
(national) Common Core standards in History or Social Studies at this
time.

The process for developing common core standards has been to
look at existing standards in the states and adopt one’s state’s work or to
integrate several states.

History standards in Texas, Arizona, and California, among
others, lack the inclusion of even the most minimal history of Mexican American
people. When the profession gets around to writing Common Core Standards
in History and Social Studies, if they turn to our state standards, unless we
amend these standards, we can anticipate that they will adopt the current
standards that fail to include Mexican American history. Adoption of such
standards would put in place starkly inadequate standards for the nation for
the next decade.

I served as a professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at
CSU-Sacramento for over 35 years. I have
written and published curriculum. I
would be pleased to work with your office in developing plans for advancing
your bill AB 1750. For example, I could recruit articulate local teachers to
testify for the bill. Please let me know if we can be of assistance.

Cordially, Dr. Duane E. Campbell ,Democracy and Education Institute

California School Budgets Change

Funding of California’s
k-12 public education system is changing fundamentally as a result of Assembly
bill 97, the
Local Control Funding Formula, designed to send additional funds to districts
where Gov. Brown believes “the need and the challenge is greatest.” The law requires that parents, students, teachers, and other
community members be involved in the process of deciding how new funds are
spent. Ed Source has an excellent guide to these changes. http://edsource.org/wp-content/publications/10-questions.pdf

Some schools will get much more money to
educate their kids. It is critical that
teachers, parents, and educational advocates get involved now. The centerpiece
of the change is the Local Control
Funding Formula. . Ed Source has an excellent guide to these changes.

Students at Franklin High in Elk Grove, California made a video on school reform that won a CSPAN award, including Duane Campbell, Director of the Institute for Democracy and Education. Here is their video.

How can we work to oppose the corporatization of pubic education? Here is a start. Class Action.

After many delays, Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook is finally ready. Backers of the initial Kickstarter (and those who order within the next week) should receive their print copies by the end of the month. The booklet will be distributed to educators and school support staff in Chicago, New York, Portland, Newark, Washington DC, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in March to help support rank-and-file activity.

Our project with the Chicago Teachers Union’s CORE Caucus and other allies ran long — the final supplement is 118 pages, more than the 50 we had budgeted for. But it was so fantastically designed by Remeike Forbes, and the photography by Katrina Ohstrom and written contributions by CTU President Karen Lewis, economist Dean Baker, Jacobin editors Megan Erickson and Shawn Gude, Joanne Barkan, Lois Weiner, and many others were so strong, we couldn’t bring ourselves to cut it down more or reduce our planned run.

For those who can’t afford to contribute — feel free to enjoy and distribute the digital edition of the booklet. We hope it’s of some use.

The Paucity of Dan Walters’ Commentary on School Issues. Dec.20, 2013.

The column by Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee entitled
“California’s School Wars Heat Up” in the print edition for Dec.20, and
“Powerful Factions Go to War Over Direction of California Schools,” http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/20/6015661/dan-walters-powerful-factions.html
in the on line version seriously
and deliberatively misinforms. Walters’s columns are reprinted in newspapers throughout the
state.

He frames the
conflict between the School Establishment ( school administrators, elected
officials, CTA]vs. the “School
Reformers”.These are indeed two of the powerful
factions, but not at all the complete story.

To understand the distortion lets see who these “reformers
“See additional posts on this website.

The cadre Walters’ calls reformers are not reformers. They are a corporate financed advocates of a system that uses scores on high-stakes tests
to punish students and teachers
while generating profits for corporations such as Pearson. They are well financed salepeople. In most cases
they do not work in schools, rather they work in lobbyist offices financed by
the Waltons, the Gates, and others.See here https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/corporate-funded-reform

There is at least one additional group who Walters ignores-
the social justice equity oriented based school reformers who have been working
in schools for decades toimprove
school opportunities for low income and minority children for decades.

There are numerous examples of this groups, here https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/home/the-creation-and-demise-of-bilingual-education-at-csu-sacramento-2,and here https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/and
CABE, Ca-Name, Raza Educators, and
the movement within both CTA and CFT known as social justice unionism.

On the national
level these approaches are well represented in the Broader, Bolder
Approach,Rethinking Schools, the
Shanker Institute and others.Diane Ravitch has been writing well about some of these efforts.

Walters’ essay reflects thesimilar narrowness in the media as it portrays the U.S. political
struggles as only between the Democrats and the Republicans . This media narrowness- created and funded
significantly by corporate ownership of media functions to move the society in
the direction of restricting democracy. See, Democracy Inc. Managed
Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism bySheldon Waldon, (2008) and Digital Disconnect; How Capitalism is
Turning the Internet Against Democracy, by Robert McChesney (2013) .

Digital
Disconnect readers benefit from McChesney’s long critical scholarly record
of studying corporate journalism as an imbedded form of corporate
capitalism and its challenge to
democracy. As he says, “capitalism
imposed its logic” ( p.89).

Most media, asillustrated by Dan Walters in today’s column with reporting and opining
on “inside baseball’ at the state capitol, are not objective observers. Walters
is in fact an integrated and important part of the campaign to turn public
schools(and other public
institutions) over to even more corporate influence and corporate control. This
narrow frame of media coverage corrupts our democratic system and needs to be
opposed.

I have been fortunate to haveserved to prepare over 600 new teachers and educational
leaders who are currently working in Sacramento areaschools and educatingchildren. Some are becoming administrators and college professors.These teachers and educational leaders
are not considered in the narrow framing of opinions presented byWalters’, but they constitute a
significantcohort of persons
immediate knowledge of the school reality and who are working for
substantiveeducational reform.

Duane Campbell is the Director of the Democracy and
Education Institute. Sacramento.

Students in Shanghai-China,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea scored the highest in all three
subjects. Switzerland and the Netherland also ranked near the top. Finland
continued to perform well, although it’s standing slipped from 2009.

The fact that the United States
hasn’t mustered any better than a barely average ranking has always triggered
alarm among many policymakers, who see the performance as irrefutable proof
that our schools are failing to prepare students for the 21sst century. Exaggerating the significance of the PISA
results unfortunately feeds the agenda of proponents of market-based “reforms.”

While it’s tempting to look at
top line numbers and draw dramatic conclusions, the PISA data is enormously
complex and can take months to evaluate and analyze properly. Many experts
caution against overreaction and urge policymakers to treat the rankings with a
healthy dose of skepticism.

The PISA test can still tell us
many things, says NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, but the results are
certainly not proof that we need to accelerate voucher programs, continue
ineffective high-stakes testing, and scapegoat teachers. U.S. students won’t
rank higher on PISA, Van Roekel explains, until the nation properly addresses
poverty and its effect on students.

“Our students from well-to-do
families have consistently done well on the PISA assessments. For students who
live in poverty, however, it’s a different story. Socioeconomic factors
influence students’ performance in the United States more than they do in all
but few of the other PISA countries,” says Van Roekel.

In 2012, Martin Carnoy and
Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute analyzed the
2009 PISA data and compared U.S. results by social class to three top
performers—Canada, Finland and South Korea. They found
that the relatively low ranking of U.S. students could be attributed in no
small part to a disproportionate number of students from high-poverty schools
among the test-takers. After adjusting the U.S. score to take into account
social class composition and possible sampling flaws, Carnoy and Rothstein
estimated that the United States placed fourth in reading and 10th in math – up
from 14th and 25th in the PISA
ranking, respectively.

It is not
surprising that this rejection of
public education as a route to prosperity for all comes from the South and states dominated
by Republican legislatures. In my
opinion, Arizona, Indiana, Texas,
and Alabama can go ahead and decline if they so choose, however we need to set
up some borders and tariffs, and perhaps trade agreements to prevent their move
to “free market” choices from imposing vast new costs on the states which
continue to want democracy and prosperity. Remember, free market ideology is what brought us the
economic crisis since 2007.

Public schools
have significantly contributed to
U.S. prosperity for the last 100
years and they have fostered our national unity. It is accurate that some public schools
are failing- particularly those serving low income and minority children. But, there is no evidence that
privatizing will improve these schools. The managerial
models brought into public education from the corporate world have failed. They
have not improved student well
being, student achievement, nor democratic opportunity.

The arguments
for privatization are based upon the myths of a “rational market”, or the
rational market hypothesis. Loyalty
to this ideology created the
recent economic crisis. There is
no evidence that more competition leads to more equality. It only leads to improved opportunity
for selected groups – now funded at state expense. It doesn’t even seem to lead
to improved schooling for the great majority of students. There is no evidence that more
competition leads to more democracy nor more democratic institutions. This is
the neo liberal myth.

The
current era is time for a change
for our society and in our schools. This generation must renew our democratic society. We face marked crises in government, politics, families, communities
and in the schools. Business
interests promote a neo liberal agenda that provides them with more profits
while starving the public sphere of the society. Public schools have a
particular responsibility to reverse these crises and to renew our democratic
society. The first mission of
pubic schooling is to equip all students for the responsibilities and
privileges of citizenship – and
many of the schools in low income areas are presently not fulfilling this mission. If we do not
solve the problems of low performing schools our democracy is endangered. For our democracy
to survive we need to create
schools that value all of our children and encourages their educational achievement.

All children need a good education to
participate in our democracy and prepare for life in the rapidly changing economy. Making schooling
valuable and useful is vital to prosperity for all. Lack of quality education is a ticket to economic hardship. The more years of school that a student
completes, the more money they are likely to earn as adults and the better their chance to get and keep a good
job. Unemployment is highest among school dropouts as is incarceration for
crimes. When we fail to educate
all of our children, the high costs of this failure come back to hurt us in
unemployment, drugs, crime, incarceration, violence and social conflict.

We
need to invest in urban schools, provide equal educational opportunities in
these schools, and recruit a well prepared teaching force that begins to reflect the student
populations in these schools. We must insist on equal opportunity to learn,
without compromise. When we do these things, we will begin
to protect the freedom to learn for our children and our grandchildren, and to
build a more just and democratic
society.

Many schools
serving urban and impoverished populations need fundamental change. These
schools do not open the doors to economic opportunity. They usually do not
promote equality. Instead, they recycle inequality. The high school drop out rates alone demonstrate that urban schools prepare less than 50 percent of their students for entrance
into the economy and society. A democratic agenda for school reform includes
insisting on fair taxation and adequate
funding for all children. We cannot build a safe, just, and prosperous
society while we leave so many young people behind.

At present there
is not a political agreement to make the necessary investments to bring about
substantial school reform in public schools. The U.S. government and your state
government will not make the necessary investments to improve education,
nor to improve health care or to rebuild the economic infrastructure. The proposals to shift public funds to
private schools is not reform. It
is a major move in the wrong direction. Their plan is to fix public
education by giving the money to
private education.

Really ?

Note; July, 2013. New York State is currently preparing a new Social Studies Framework. Like California's 1998 Framework, it does a disservice to Mexican American students and Mexican American history. As we argue below, it is urgent that California rewrite its History/Social Science Framework now. If we wait until 2016, the current outdated and biased framework will be included in efforts develop common core standards in History and Civics. That is what is happening now in the New York effort.

Note: Sacramento advocate Michelle Rhee is implicated in the developing influence buying scandal at the California State Capitol with Senator Calderon.

Also see: http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2013/11/papering-over-public-k-12-school-reform.html

How Wall Street Power Brokers Are Designing the Future of Public Education as a Money-Making Machine

Ana Simonton, Alternet. December 5, 2013 |

Given that Arthur Rock has a net worth of $1 billion, lives in California and spends his time heaping money on tech startups (with the mantra, “Get in, get out,” as his guide), a local school board race in Atlanta, Ga. seems an unlikely candidate for his attention.

Yet there is his name, on the campaign finance disclosure reports of four candidates—two of whom were elected in November, and two who won a runoff[3]on December 3—for the board of Atlanta Public Schools. On each report, two columns over from his name, the sum of $2,500 is listed, the maximum allowable amount.

The APS race was a pivotal one for Atlanta, a city still dealing with the fallout of a cheating scandal[4] that thrust its public school system into the national limelight. Only two incumbents were re-elected to the nine-seat board.

The biggest question facing the board of newcomers is to what degree they will embrace charter schools. Last year, Georgia voters passed a constitutional amendment that enabled the creation of a state-appointed commission authorized to bypass local and state school boards in approving new charter schools. Critics say the measure passed because the text on the ballot, written by governor Nathan Deal, referenced “parental involvement” and “student achievement,” but not the specific authorities of the commission. In this climate, APS, which already has the most charter schools of any Georgia school district, will only avoid becoming the next laboratory for corporate education reform with significant pushback from the new school board.

That’s where Arthur Rock comes in. And a lot of other rich people, too.

Rock is not the only name on the reports with financial power and a less than obvious connection to Atlanta Public Schools. Greg Penner[5] of the Walmart empire, Dave Goldberg of the Sheryl Sandberg empire (they’re married), and Kent Thiry of the DaVita kidney dialysis empire (it sounds inglorious, but he pulls in $17 million annually), are among the names that had some Atlantans scratching their heads this election season.

Last week, in “Is There A
‘Corporate Education Reform’ Movement?”, I wrote
about the logic of forming strategic alliances on specific issues with those
who are not natural allies, even those with whom you mostly disagree. This does
not mean, however, that there aren’t those – some with enormous wealth and
power – who are bent on undermining the American labor movement generally and
teachers’ unions specifically. This is part one of a two-part post on this
reality.

The American union movement is, it
must be said, embattled and beleaguered. The recent passage of the Orwellian
named ‘right to work’ law in Michigan, an anti-union milestone in the
birthplace of the United Auto Workers and cradle of American industrial
unionism, is but the latest assault on American working people and their
unions.[1] Since the backlash election of 2010 that brought Tea Party
Republicans to power in a number of state governments, public sector workers
have faced a legislative agenda designed to eviscerate their rights to organize
unions and bargain collectively in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana,
Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Fueling these attacks is an
underlying organic crisis that has greatly weakened the labor movement and its
ability to defend itself. Union membership has fallen from a high point of 1 in
3 American workers at the end of WW II to a shade over 1 in 9 today. [2] At its
height, American unions had unionized basic industries – auto, mining, steel,
textiles, telecommunications – and had sufficient density to raise wages and
improve working conditions for members and non-union workers as well. According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 2012, organized American labor has
fallen to its lowest density in nearly a century. Today, American unions have
high density in only one major sector of the economy, K-12 education, and in
that sector unions are now under ferocious attack. [3]

Even this stark description
understates the true depth of the crisis. At the end of WW II, public sector
workers in the ranks of organized labor were a small fraction of their private
sector counterparts. Today, that relationship is dramatically reversed: 4 in 11
American public sector workers belong to a union, while only 1 in 15 private
sector workers are unionized. Public sector workers are organized at more than
five times the rate of private sector workers. The explosive growth of public
sector unions in the late 1960s and early 1970s took place just as private
sector industrial unions were beginning to hemorrhage from a ‘race to the
bottom’ fueled by technological change and a deeply flawed model of economic
globalization dominated by corporate interests (see here, here, and here).

These trends were reinforced by weak
labor law that was increasingly tilted against the rights of workers and poorly
enforced, a development condemned by Human Rights
Watch, Freedom House and Amnesty International. In this context,
the emergence of the leading public sector unions – the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – masked a great deal of the blood-letting to the
industrial unions that had been the heart and soul of the American labor
movement from the New Deal onward.

For decades, public sector unions
have decried the harm done to American working people as a result of the
decline of private sector unions. Others have pointed to the long term economic
damage done to the U.S. by this anti-union
campaign. The mounting economic inequality that has plagued the United
States since the 1970s is, in significant measure, an artifact of the shrinking
political and economic power of the American labor movement, a phenomenon that
tracks with the decline of the once mighty industrial unions. [4]

But, until recently, public sector
unions believed that the nature of their members’ work provided important
protection against the economic globalization that has decimated private sector
unions. It is not possible, after all, to offshore the nursing of critically
ill patients, the policing of communities, or the teaching of reading to
children in the same way that unionized manufacturing jobs have been sent
abroad to low-wage, authoritarian settings that deny workers the right to
organize into free, independent unions. That difference was sufficient, many
believed, to prevent public sector workers from being drawn into the ‘race to
the bottom.’

The great economic downturn of the
last five years has shown this belief to be an illusion. The loss of union
density in America’s private sector, with the resultant decline of salaries,
benefits and working conditions, has left public sector workers and their
unions vulnerable to a politics of fear and resentment, which seeks to cast
them as a privileged class.

One telling example can be found in
the attacks on public sector workers’ retirement plans. The decline of
industrial unions has been accompanied by the systematic dismantling of private
sector workers’ “defined benefit” pension plans, which had guaranteed
retirement security to generations of America’s unionized workers. Unionized
public sector workers, who for the most part still possessed such plans, were
then exposed to a right-wing campaign arguing that government could not afford
such ”rich” retirement plans. A demagogic appeal was made to private sector
workers: “why should a teacher, a nurse or a firefighter have such retirement
benefits, when you, who finance that retirement with your taxes, do not?”
Similar attacks were launched on public sector salaries and health insurance,
in hopes of fueling a backlash movement that would weaken public sector unions
and leave their members with diminished real income and living conditions. [5]

In a coordinated campaign,
corporate-financed advocacy and “think tank” groups launched an attack on the
due process rights of public sector workers, such as teacher tenure, with the
objective of forcing workers into nonunion, ”at will” employment. If
successful, this campaign against public sector unionization would leave
workers in the same diminished condition as their private sector brethren.

The campaign against public sector
workers and their unions reached a crescendo in the aftermath of the 2010
elections that swept Tea Party Republicans to power in numerous states. Fearful
that the demographics of 21st century America were stacked against them
(and the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party), Tea Party
activists opened up two major fronts in their fight to retain power: On
the one hand, they advocated for “voter suppression” laws, designed to make it
more difficult for core Democratic constituencies – people of color, immigrants
and the poor – to vote. On the other hand, they pushed forward on “union
suppression” laws, designed to undermine the core strength of the American
trade union movement in the electoral arena – public sector unions. In the wake
of the 2010 midterms, as the nation followed the gripping struggle of public
employees in Wisconsin to retain their right to free association and collective
bargaining, similar battles were being waged in state capitols across the
nation. In each and every state, the theme of public employee privilege was
played out with a strategy to incite fear and resentment.

To appreciate the full power of the
forces now arrayed against American unions, consider that, at the height of the
Wisconsin struggle, 9 of the 10 individuals on the Forbes list of the top ten richest Americans were actively financing part
of the campaign against public sector unions. With U.S. income inequality at
the highest levels since just before the Great Depression, it appears that the
nation’s corporate elite are intent on delivering a coup de grâce to
what remains of the American labor movement.

- Leo Casey

*****

[1] Research shows that there is no evidence that “right to work” laws
enhance productivity, encourage innovation or create jobs; they do, however,
tend to lower wages and labor standards. Unions, on the other hand, can serve
to generate higher wages, which leads to higher consumption and demand, and
thus greater economic activity.

[2] This and subsequent data on union
membership trends is drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual report on
the subject. For the latest report, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union
Members – 2012” available here. The high point of the American
trade union movement preceded the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act by a
Republican-Dixiecrat dominated Congress that overrode a veto by President Harry
Truman. Among other things, Taft-Hartley authorized the passage of state “right
to work” laws, with the goal of keeping multiracial unions from gaining a
significant foothold in the Jim Crow South. The CIO’s Operation Dixie, a
post-WW II campaign to organize unions in the South, was thwarted in
significant part by right to work laws passed in the Deep South. The recent
passage of right to work legislation in Indiana and Michigan is significant in
the extension of right to work laws into what had been labor’s heartland.

[3] For measures of union density,
see the chart at UnionStats. The only comparable
rates of density to K-12 education are found in considerably smaller sections
of the public sector, such as fire fighters, and parts of the transportation
industry, such as flight attendants.

[4] See Timothy Noah, The Great
Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. See also Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld,
“Unions, Norms, and the Rise in American Wage Inequality” available here.

[5] These charges do not stand up to
scholarly examination, see here, here, here, and here, but they remain part of the standard attack on public sector
employees.

Last December 3, the California Fair Political Practices Commission recommended fining Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a Democrat, $37,500 for improperly reporting donations to his multiple nonprofit groups. The political watchdog agency agreed to this penalty at a Dec. 13 meeting. The donations included a total of $500,000 between Jan. 19, 2012, and June 5, 2012, from the Walton Family Foundation to Stand Up for Sacramento Schools, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit school reform group that Johnson founded in 2009 with a commitment of $500,000 from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

The money trail, however, goes beyond Mayor Johnson’s untimely reporting of donations to his nonprofits. His local education reform efforts illustrate a broader national trend: corporate funding of education reform via nonprofits to alter public schools. In an era of a growing income gap between corporate America and the general public—the one percent and 99 percent, in the words of the Occupy Wall Street movement—the power of corporate-funded philanthropy to shape public policy has become part of the social landscape. In the case of school reform, breaking public-sector unions is high on this elite agenda. Consider the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nonunion behemoth based in Bentonville, Ark. This family had a net worth of $115.5 billion in 2012, according to the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. Its foundation “invested” close to $160 million in K-12 education reform across the U.S. in 2011: http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/about/2011-grant-report. Read the detailed and valuable report.

We defeated the billionaires efforts to crush organized labor and to continue
the anti tax radicalism.

We defeated the anti labor proposition 32.

We passed Prop. 30, to fund schools, universities and social
services. This is a floor under
austerity. It raises taxes
on the rich to pay for services.
It does raise sales tax by ¼ of
percent – but 90% of the tax increases are on the rich . A tax of 1-3 %
on those who make over $250,000 per year.

Democrats for Educational Reform.

Gloria Romero -- The former Senate leader remains bitter from her loss in the
Supt. of Public Instruction race two years ago. Formerly favored by labor, a
member of CFA. Her harsh videos and ads against Prop 32 joined with others in
the anti union effort. She actively campaigned for Prop.38, the anti teacher
union effort on school funding. Prop. 38 – the Munger Inititative- was qualified and funded
substantially to take resources and votes away from the effort to fund
education in Prop.30. She lost.

Former California State Senator
Gloria Romero is the State Director of Democrats for Education Reform.

The anti union nature of Democrats
for Education Reform were also
demonstrated by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. He is the Chair of the Obama Administration’s Mayors
Committee on Education and husband of Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of
Washington D.C. schools. He remained
silent on the effort to pass Prop.30 to fund California Schools.

On the other hand. DSA Chair Dolores Huerta was an active
pro-union voice for No on Prop.32 and Yes on Proposition 30. She made videos
and ads and spoke at rallies with
the campaigns.

It is valuable to know who are your
allies, your opponents, and those critics who drain campaign energy.

In the MOOC philosophy, education is
understood fundamentally as a transfer of information, in line with the
computational understanding of cognition in which the mind is a processing
device being fed input and generating output. This is a twenty-first-century
version of what Paulo Freire called the “banking method of education,” a model
that Deweyan humanists and practitioners of critical pedagogy have long
repudiated as reactionary and disempowering.

Editor’s note. I am an ardent advocate of the use of
technology in promoting quality education, but that is not the same as
MOOCs. To examine the
differences I took one of the MOOCs courses from Stanford. It was clearly pre collegiate in
nature.

In my own professional life and in my book, Choosing
Democracy, I argue for both critical thinking and the development of strong
democracy. MOOCs courses promote
neither. They are best suited to a
very fixed nature of learning, usually able to behaviorize such as math or other sequential
learning.

In 2010, the U.S. college graduation rate ranked 34th. out of the 34 countries in the OECD survey . In 2010, the U.S. high school graduation rate ranked 21st. our of the 26 countries in the OECD survey. OECD is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. ( the advanced, industrialized countries.)
In 2011, the average Canadian citizen was wealthier than the average U.S. citizen, and all residents of Canada have government insured health care.

One
of the things the right wing does is keep organizing. While we rest and
recover from an election such as California Prop. 30, they are off on their
next campaign. They do this by having hundreds of advocates. So that
while some recover, others launch their next campaign.

The Common Core State
Standards are poised to guide U.S. educational practice and assessment for the
coming years. This commentary examines the framing of the argument for the new
standards by the constructors of the CCSS and how the alignment of resources
during the implementation phase is tightly ensconced within the organizations
who drafted the standards.

Framing education as in need of additional rigor
and collective cohesion, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are now
promoted as a redeemer for educational reform while No Child Left Behind
quietly fades into the background. As states are currently invited to
pursue “relief from provisions of …(NCLB)” (http://www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility),
the CCSS are poised to preside over a movement to (what are self-described as)
more rigorous, more communal and more state-led standards and assessments (http://www.corestandards.org/).

The California Budget Project does excellent work in analyzing the state budget. They say state spending per K-12 student will rise in the current (2012-13) fiscal year and in 2013-14 due to voter approval of two revenue measures – Proposition 30 and Proposition 39 – last November, according to the Governor’s proposed 2013-14 budget. Yet even with this increase, per student state support for public schools will remain much lower than the 2007-08 level, after adjusting for inflation.

If the national movement
to "reform" public education through vouchers, charters and
privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states
to undertake a program of "virtual schools" — charters operated
online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet — as well as one
of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run
by for-profits.

A
historic lawsuit was filed in May against the State of California requesting
that the current education finance system be declared unconstitutional and that
the state be required to establish a school finance system that provides all
students an equal opportunity to meet the academic goals set by the State.

The
case, Robles-Wong, et al. v. State of California, was filed in the
Superior Court of California in Alameda County. Specifically, the suit asks the
court to compel the State to align its school finance system—its funding
policies and mechanisms—with the educational program that the State has put in
place. To do this, plaintiffs allege, the State must scrap its existing finance
system; do the work to determine how much it actually costs to fund public
education to meet the state’s own program requirements and the needs of
California’s school children; and develop and implement a new finance system
consistent with Constitutional requirements.

The
lawsuit was filed by a broad coalition, including more than 60 individual
students and their families, nine school districts from throughout the State,
the California School Boards Association (CSBA), California State PTA, and the
Association of California School Administrators (ACSA).

The Institute applauds this initiative.

California Education
Statistics

Staffing ratios

California’s ranking:

• 49th
among
all states in student-teacher ratios. (Digest of Education Statistics

Why there are few funds for schools - the economic crises of the states

The currenteconomic crisis has forced the cutting
of higher education, of k-12 education, and of social welfare systems. What
caused this crisis ? It was caused by the greed and avarice of the financial
class and aided by the politicians of both major political parties.

Major banks and corporations looted
the economy creating an international meltdown.Now, they have been rewarded with bail out money. The crisis was not caused by students,
teachers, public employeesnor
recipients of social security. Now we have cuts in parks,in universities, in nurses, libraries.School children did not create this
crisis.Foster care children did
not create this crisis.

The major bankers, finance
capitalists in the U.S. robbed the bank last year– and the federal treasury.They took hundreds of billions of dollars – and you and I
will have to pay for it.Goldman Sachs alone took $10 Billion. For example,Ken
Lewis of Bank of America received an 81 million dollar pension. They have not even been punished.One thing we should do is arrest the
top 100 executives and CEO’s of these companies, give them a fair trial, and
throw them in jail.Until we
arrest some people – there will be no real changes.”

Our financial system as a whole crashed
not because of one bank. Goldman Sachs certainly played a major role as did JP
Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and CitiCorp, along with the many corporate
finance institutions like Bear
Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, WaMu, Depfa.We had a systemic breakdown because nearly all of our policy
makers, academics, politicians, and pundits promoted a failed, self serving ideology of self-correcting financial markets.

(Including specifically the econmics profession ) Finance profiteers walked off with big bucks
while contributing to the crash of the system. The looting continues to
this day.

So, the financiers robbed the banks
and created the Great Recession. –
and the government allowed them to do so. Government policy, including the work of Geithner, Summers,
and both the Bush and the Obama
Administration, regularly placed the interests of Wall Street ahead of the
interests of working people.Our
economy was looted –we lost $11
Trillion.Now, working people are losing their
homes.Over 10,000,000 jobs have
been lost.Over 15 million people
are unemployed. .Nationally, unemploymentfor African Americansis over 15.4%,for Latinosit is over 12.7%. For African Americans and Latinos under 25
years of age; it is over 25%.That
is young people in theAfrican Americans andLatino communities are in a Depression.

42
of the states have financial crises.We will have fewer teachers, fewer police officers, cuts in needed
health care, cuts in school spending—all because a small cadre robbed the
banks.Today, this same group is
making millions in bonuses and special payments, while the economy remains
stuck in a recession.

If
you want some detail on how this was done, see:

Paul Krugman.The
Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.(2009)

Dean Baker,Plunder
and Blunder; The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.(2009)

I was giving a speech on the political
control of public schooling to a forum here in Sacramento. A
teacher in the conference asked, “ I understand your points on NCLB, on
multicultural education, on Race to the Top, and on testing, but what can we do
about these things?”

What a great question.

We need to propose alternatives.
There are numerous clear voices to explain the education crisis, the
economic collapse and the health crisis. We need to magnify and
extend these voices. Unfortunately money buys access and power both in
Washington and in Sacramento.

The appointment of Arne Duncan was symptomatic of the problems.
He represents the kind of corporate/media approach to reform. Where do these policy proposals come
from?The Race to the Top
proposals come from legislators and lobbyists whose own self interest guide
their recommendations, not the interests of students in schools.

Why then in
schools do we allow politicians, lobbyists, and other “experts” who are not
teachers and have not worked in classrooms for over ten years, and who have not
taught children, to make the basic decisions about schooling. As a starting point, clearly those
establishing our policies do not understand testing and its limits. (See Bracey, 2009).

A major problem with our
campaigns for a democratic approach to schooling is that most of the media has
been sold a mindset or framework of accountability. Corporate
sponsored networks and “ think tanks” such as the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and their
access to the media is not likely to change. The domination of the
accountability frame within the media and political circles must be
opposed.

In
the current era of media downsizing and consolidation, when corporate
domination of the news “business” has increased, the remaining reporters and
editors rely more and more upon press releases, public relations campaigns and
advocacy organizations. Public relations campaigns- including those of the
government- are regularly passed
off as news. ( See Robert W.
McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 2013) The reduced number of journalists depend
upon a narrow range of opinions of people in power with a bias toward seeing
the schools through the eyes of the corporate elite. The children of the corporate elite rarely attend public
schools.

There are many advocacy strategies.
However, the most important is to share and magnify teacher voices.
Politicians make bad decisions – such as the current budget cuts, or an over
reliance on testing- because they are not listening to teachers voices.
Instead they are listening to paid consultants, and “experts” from the
corporate establishment.

Newspaper writers and other
media writers make the same mistake. They call their favorite “source”
which just happens to be a corporate promoter like Arne Duncan, Michele Rhee, or
one of the “experts” at elite universities. Note: few
professors in the elite universities work with teachers. They are
several steps removed from the classroom. You can read more about this on
the blog Choosing Democracy http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com and searching
for PACT. Or here: http://sites.google.com/site/assessingpact/

The most basic strategy is
to insist on teacher participation in the development of policies. Get
the politicians and the corporate shills out of the classroom. – they have
failed our children.

Why California students do not understand Chicano/Latino history.

The Institute has been working for the last two years to change the California
History/Social Science Framework for California Public Schools to include the
significant contributions of Mexicans and Chicanos to the history of the
state.The Framework, along with
the standards,provides the
guidelines for what is to be taught and what is to be included in the
historyand social science
textbooks in California.The
current Framework, written in 1987, has virtually no inclusion of
Chicano/Mexican/Latino history and little inclusion of Asian American
history.Frameworks are to be
revised each 7 years.

More on this in the Chicano / Mexican American Digital History Project site.

We have worked in a variety of schools
and universities since 1969, always working with some of the most disadvantaged
students. Our efforts have been to
improve schooling for the oppressed.

California public schools
are in crisis- and they are getting worse. This is a consequence of massive budget cuts imposed on the
schools by the legislature and the governor in the last four years. Total
per pupil expenditure is down over $1,000 per student. The result is
significant class size
increases. Students are in
often classes too large for learning. Supplementary services such as
tutoring, art, and drop out prevention classes have been eliminated. Over 14,000 teachers have
been dismissed due to the budget emergencies. (see above) 2008- 2012.

Over 48% of the children in California public schools
are Chicano/Latino or descendents of Mexican/Latino parents. The Chicano drop out rate has not
significantly changed in 30 years.
All children need a good education to participate in our democracy and
prepare for life in the rapidly changing economy.

We need to invest in
urban schools, provide equal educational opportunities in these schools, and
recruit a well prepared teaching force that begins to reflect the student
populations in these schools. We must insist on equal opportunity to learn,
without compromise. When we do these things, we will begin to
protect the freedom to learn for our children and our grandchildren, and to
build a more just and democratic society.

The many voices for corporate
designed school reform fail in part because they do not include a strategy for addressing the effects of
poverty. We need strategies to address poverty and strategies to engage parents
and teachers to take
responsibility for student learning. The fake reformers claim poverty is not an issue but it is –
and budget cut backs make it worse.

We
are necessarily political. That is
where the money is.

Mission

The Institute for
Democracy and Education (Sacramento), is a network of
scholars and students, professionals in schools and public agencies, advocates,
community activists, and youth. We use research and advocacy as tools
to empower individuals, build relationships, and create knowledge for civic
participation and social change. We seek to link our public
university with committed educators and supportive community alliances to
challenge the pervasive racial and social class inequalities in the
Sacramento region and in California.

Our task is to preserve and extend a vision of
democratic possibility in education. Central to this task is preserving
quality public schools.

We seek to
provide a clear analysis of economic issue in the schools and in our society in
their real world context- not from the perspective of the corporate elites and
their loyal servants in the media

The institute’s work advances a
complex understanding of the causes and costs of underfunding our schools and
of educational inequality. We begin with the premise that all
students have a fundamental right to a quality public education that
enables them to graduate from high school prepared to become active citizens.

We believe that
teachers are part of one of the most valued professions we have in
educating future generations in the discourse, values and relations of a
democratic society.

The campaign of
the right, and of the anti teacher
efforts are to weaken the autonomy and the authority of teachers by controlling
salaries, tenure, unions and decision making. These must be
resisted to preserve quality schools.

The Institute for Democracy and Education is an
independent, non partisan research and advocacy organization
established in 2009 to promote debate on the important issues of
democracy, education and schools.